passage warning that the treatment of
women was a marker of the family’s
honor, and that a household in which
the women were badly treated would
disappear. In real life women exercised
considerably more power than in this
theoretical model, but such power usu-
ally came later in life, when a woman’s
sons had formed families of their own,
and she had thus become the matriarch
of an extended family.
Subhadra
The divine sister of the god Jagannath,
who is invariably pictured with him and
their brother Balabhadra. The most
important site for these three deitiesis
the Jagannath temple in the city of Puri,
at which Jagannath is the presiding
deity. Although Jagannath is identified
with the god Krishna, he is generally
considered an autochthonous (“of the
land”) deity who was originally the local
deity of Puri. He has been assimilated
into the Hindu pantheon by his identifi-
cation with Krishna.
One piece of evidence for this theory
is the deities’ invariable appearance,
with Jagannath (Krishna) on the right,
his brother Balabhadra (Balarama) on
the left, and Subhadra as a smaller figure
in the center. Such a triadic grouping
is virtually unknown in Krishna devo-
tion, which tends to stress either
Krishna alone or the divine couple
of Krishna and Radha. The female figure
of Subhadra is also very unusual, since
as Jagannath’s sister she is ineligible
for the amorous adventures usually
associated with Krishna. Although
Jagannath is the most important of
the three deities, the identifications with
the other two also reveal larger
syncretizing tendencies. Balabhadra is
sometimes identified as a form of
the god Shiva, and Subhadra as the
powerful goddess Durga. In this way,
Puri’s divine trio embody the three
most important Hindu deities. For
further information on Subhadra and
her brothers, the best source is
Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann
Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi, The
Cult of Jagannath and the Regional
Traditions of Orissa, 1978.Subodhini
(“Greatly enlightening”) A name given to
commentaries on various texts—pre-
sumably because of the commentary’s
ability to illuminate the text. The most
famous of these commentaries, to
which the name Subodhini is often
understood to refer, is the one by
Vallabhacharya (1479–1531) on the
Bhagavata Purana. The Bhagavata
Purana is one of the later sectarian
compendia known as puranas, and it is
the most important source for the
mythology of the god Krishna, whom
Vallabhacharya considered the Supreme
Being. Vallabhacharya’s Subodhinilays
out the basic doctrines of his religious
community, known as the Pushti Marg
because of their stress on god’s grace,
which they called pushti, meaning “that
which nourishes the soul.”Subrahmanya
(“dear to brahmins”) Epithet of the god
Skanda, particularly in his southern
Indian manifestation as Murugan. See
Skandaand Murugan.Subtle Body
Alternate human physiological system
that exists on a different plane than
gross matter, but has certain correspon-
dences with the anatomy of the material
body. Different parts of the subtle body
contain the microcosmic forms of the
deities Shivaand Shakti, the bipolar
forces believed to be the powers behind
the cosmos. The subtle body is thus
based on the principle of the homology,
or essential similarities, of macrocosm
and microcosm, a fundamental Hindu
idea since the time of the Upanishads.
The Sanskrittexts describing the subtle
body assume that there are different
planes of reality, and thus that the subtle
body actually exists, but given the net-
work of symbols associated with it, oneSubtle Body